Mobility and its discontents: Seeing beyond international space and progressive time

The givenness of international space

International space is the earth’s geography, understood as territory, and divided amongst sovereign states. This particular conception of political geography operates as a kind of common sense that foregrounds discussion of human mobility. It is a space delineated by borders that mark the edges of one sovereign territory and that of another. It is the space in which the citizen is at home and the migrant is out of place. It is the space that compels the specification as internal migrants those who have not crossed an international border in what has become a default understanding of migration as international (see, e.g. Brettell and Hollifield, 2015: 25, note 21). It is the space of closed borders and the space of open borders, insofar as a world with open borders is imagined as the inverse, rather than transcendence, of a closed borders regime.

Critical scholars of International Relations – a discipline founded on a clear distinction between domestic and international, and perhaps most resistant to efforts to challenge the line between one state and another – have long questioned the givenness of international space as uniform, contiguous and all-encompassing. They pointed out from the 1990s that an account of international space premised on the story of Westphalia is decontextualized from actual processes of state formation, transformation and disintegration (Agnew, 1994; Branch, 2014; Ruggie, 1993). As Ruggie (1993: 165) argued then, the ‘unbundling’ of territory has been a consistent feature of the spaces made in the context of the international state system, from extraterritorial spaces of exception to the shared sovereign domains of the European Union. Anthropologists, sociologists, legal scholars, geographers, political scientists and urbanists likewise challenged the notion that sovereignty is distributed evenly across territorial domains, demonstrating its disaggregated, graduated, partial, portable and multi-scalar expressions (Anghie, 2005; Brenner, 2004; Ong, 2000; Quirk and Vigneswaran, 2015; Sassen, 2006; Stoler, 2006). In the early 2000s, a critique of methodological nationalism also cautioned against the assumptions of international space and the recourse to statistics (especially concerning citizens and migrants) that rely on those assumptions as the basis for inquiry into nations, nationalisms and mobilities that take transnational, translocal and transversal forms (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002). Yet methodological nationalism remains endemic. When debates run hot about refugee quotas, labour migration schemes, pathways to citizenship and so on, they reflect contending arrangements within international space. There are, to be sure, better and worse arrangements of this kind, making these debates consequential. Equally important, however, is retaining a critical distance from international space in order to ask whether that particular space is in fact or ought to be the basis upon which people live or envisage their lives.

Methods employed in border policing belie the certainties of international space, even as they are justified with reference to the defence of clearly demarcated sovereign territories. For example, the Australian Border Force, the agency tasked with control of Australia’s borders, explicitly refers to its operational space as a border continuum with onshore and offshore dimensions (ABF, 2018). Immigration, border and security agencies in Australia and elsewhere have been pushing borders offshore and regulating the space of refugee protection unevenly for some time (Coddington, 2018; Ghezelbash, 2018; Mountz, 2011). Offshore territories in which asylum seekers, amongst others, are detained are deliberately designed to create jurisdictional ambiguity. Made famous in relation to Guantanamo Bay and detention of ‘enemy combatants’, offshore territories of this kind mimic offshore financial centres, designed as sites of exception to national tax regimes. Once associated with the shady business of money laundering in secretive island locations, offshore financial centres have been normalized as part of state strategies to optimize positioning in the global political-economy (Palan, 2003; Sharman, 2010). The logic of offshore, as Peter Chambers (2018: 56) contends, relies on the notion of a fixed border outside of which the offshore site lies. However, logic of this kind becomes non-sensical when, for example, the entire Australian mainland is deemed an ‘offshore excised place’ for the purposes of seeking asylum. The logic becomes equally non-sensical in the case of London and New York, where offshore financial centres operate in the heart of the United States’ and United Kingdom’s largest onshore cities.

That borders are differentially produced at specific times and places and differentially applied to different people with a range of implications and effects is a point well established within Critical Border Studies (for a summary of the field, see Stierl, 2019: 22–25). From this perspective, the disjuncture between international space and the spatial technologies deployed by states in diverse regulatory practices is less of a logical conundrum than a strategy through which states mitigate the fallout from the failure of international space to live up to its mythology (McNevin, 2011). And yet the point that borders are not what they seem is worth reiterating, precisely because the multiplication of borders is a process that entails an intensified reification of hard border lines, alongside and partly in reaction to the grossly uneven effects of all that goes by the name of globalization. The point is worth reiterating also, because the vast bulk of inquiry into migration starts from what Radhika Mongia (2018: 5) calls ‘methodological statism’ such that what is also an effect of state regulation – the material and symbolic production of the border – is mistaken for a pre-existing background against which human mobility unfolds. In this way, the scope of political responses to the question of the border remains stuck between degrees of openness and closure, as if the solidity of international space were not itself in question.

The givenness of progressive time

Progressive time is the sense of time moving forward in a single linear direction. According to the assumptions of progressive time, the earth’s peoples and geographies are situated at different points along this trajectory, some more advanced than others, but all moving in roughly the same way. Progressive time suggests that citizenship, in its nation-state form, is an obvious end-goal for those who lack it in general (the stateless), for those who seek it on their own terms (the colonized) and for those whose status (as migrant, resident or undocumented) does not yet correspond with full membership of the place in which they live, love or work (cf Fernandez and Olson, 2011).

The givenness of progressive time, like that of international space, has been subject to extensive critique. Since the 1980s, distinctions between advanced and backwards economies and societies have been challenged as the sanitized updates of a Eurocentric discourse that has long deployed a logic of temporal sequencing in order to justify all manner of violence, exploitation and paternalism, whether in the form of direct colonization, structural economic reform or humanitarian intervention. Such projects have been rationalized as civilizing missions to bring the less enlightened into the modern world, to convert, democratize and develop. When modernity and development are registered in singular and unidirectional terms, other trajectories can only be dismissed as relics of tradition and irrational forces to be overcome in a one-way path to progress. The result, argue critics, is complicity between temporal sequencing and spatial ordering, in ways that preserve the interests of what we know today as the global north (Fabian, 1983; Massey, 2005).

Notions of the global north and global south as homogenous geographic containers obscure enormous variation in the extent to which the progressive promise of citizenship is and has been available. For many within the global north, citizenship has failed to deliver the rights that T.H. Marshall (1992) famously described in terms of an evolutionary sequence encompassing more and more people and more and more entitlements from the 17th to the 20th century. Despite the conferral of citizenship status, Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and immigrants have struggled to achieve recognition and entitlements on equal terms with others. As states pursued neoliberal agendas in the late 20th century, citizenship became disaggregated in other cross-cutting ways (Ong, 2006; Somers, 2008). Expanded entitlements were not made available to many whose employment became precarious at the same time that welfare states retreated, and whose prospects were depleted by unevenly distributed investment and neglect across cities, suburbs and industrial peripheries (Brenner, 2004). As citizenship rights became increasingly tied to measures of productivity and individual responsibility, the jobless, poor and criminalized became disenfranchised in ways that intersected with enduring and creative forms of racial prejudice (Alexander, 2012; Anderson, 2013).

In the global south, post-colonial states have been shaped by neo-colonial relations in the form of both a science of development and residual ethnic identity categories that fuel conflict and constrain the limits of contending projects for self-government (Mamdani, 2001; Prashad, 2009; Quijano, 2000). Landau and Bakewell (2018: 11) note ‘the absence of substantive political citizenship’ across much of Africa, such that ‘a form of de-enthicised civic belonging remains an untested myth or dream’. The expansion of social rights to education in Africa, Asia and Latin America since the 1970s, did not correspond with the generation of sufficient middle-class jobs, creating a surplus labour force that is often highly skilled, but stuck in what Craig Jeffrey (2010) calls a state of ‘chronic … waiting’ (3).

What seems apparent across the global north and south is the sense that citizenship does not guarantee progressive movement forward in time, and that nativist, autochthonous, neoliberal and geopolitical forces continue to fragment the bases upon which equal citizenship might be built. In the 1990s, labour migration from south to north was promoted by development experts as a win-win solution for some of the obstacles to the full realization of citizenship rights, correcting for under-development in the case of the global south and addressing the demographic pressures of an aging workforce (and tax-base) in the global north. More recently however, migrants from the global south have been re-inscribed as invasive opportunists threatening to destabilize cultural norms and what remains of welfare states in the global north. Development assistance to the global south has thus corresponded with securitized efforts to contain and deter would-be migrants by addressing ‘root causes’ of displacement and joblessness at home – strategies that have also involved collaboration with oppressive governments in the global south in ways that exacerbate the denial of citizenship rights. If, in the former case, the ‘migration-development nexus’ represented the (frequently illusive) promise of integration within a global developmental trajectory, the latter case of containment represents the outright exclusion of would-be migrants from this sense of global time (Landau, 2018).

Staying power

If international space and progressive time are not as given as they seem; if, in many ways, both abstract and lived, they appear to be more caricature and mirage than reality, what accounts for their staying power as the given foundations for the conditions under which mobility can be governed? What can account, conversely, for the failure of imagination to think space, time and political relations in other ways – ways that do not so much break with reality as draw from the actual diversity that registers with experience?

From a political-economy perspective, international space and progressive time support a particular arrangement of mobility and subjectivity that fosters capital accumulation. States facilitate cross-border movement selectively, in order to make some forms of labour more exploitable and to warehouse those that are surplus to requirements. The ability of certain bodies to translate labour into value is cut through by markers of race, ethnicity, nationality and gender that rationalize unequal remuneration and degrees of disposability (Rajaram, 2018). The proliferation of status forms and visa classes across the spectrum of citizens and migrants supports an arrangement that is at once more diverse and more fine-tuned in terms of what it can squeeze – just in time and to the point – from the subjects it brings into being and the bodies they inhabit (Donato and Massey, 2016; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Sharma and Wright, 2008–2009).

From a governmentality perspective, the convergence of state, intergovernmental, private, non-governmental and humanitarian practice around an agenda of Migration Management represents a distinct rationality that disciplines human mobility in ways that align with the assumptions of international space, the demands of global capital and a liberal international order (Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010; Bigo, 2002; Geiger and Pécoud, 2013; Georgi, 2010; Oelgemöller, 2017; Soguk, 1999). This is not something reducible to a top-down form of population control. Alongside agencies that exercise a more explicit control function at the level of political-economy, migrants themselves and their allies are implicated in Migration Management. Each time, for instance, an appeal is made for amnesties for undocumented migrants, the authority of the state to decide on their status is affirmed. Depending on conditions attached to the amnesty, a progressive sense of gradual inclusion and integration for deserving outsiders is reinforced, often on the basis of the value of migrants to national economies, or in ways that bolster attachments to a benevolent and hospitable state. Scholars too are implicated in crucial ways, when they treat refugees, irregular migrants and other administrative categories as ‘given realities waiting to be researched’ (Scheel, 2019, p. 218). Here, it makes little difference whether the research is positioned pro or contra the rights and entitlements of respective migrants. Such positioning creates the appearance of debate, but only within the parameters of pre-given subject forms that take their shape from international space and come to stand for the limits of political reality.

Sometimes, the regulation of mobility appears to contradict established modes of (liberal) reason and economic interest. More revealing, in such cases, are structures of feeling associated with ‘intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning … whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism’ (Taussig, 1984: 471). Structures of feeling form a shared background to collective pursuits, directing practice without being articulated consciously, and they sit in a complex relation to the formalized beliefs and worldviews that one may hold (Williams, 1977: 132). Michael Taussig emphasizes these dynamics in his attempt to account for the atrocious acts of violence committed against Indians in the Putumayo region between Columbia and Peru as colonizers put them to work gathering rubber in the early 20th century. In this case, political-economy could not account for the nature and extent of the violence, which did not necessarily enhance profitability of the colonial enterprise. The colonizers, argues Taussig, were gripped by fear of rebellion and reprisal by the Indians; fear that the Indians would pursue the same violence against their captors that they had been subjected to, or something more extreme that derived from the exoticized savagery imputed to the natives. This, ‘colonial mirror’ and the feelings that sustained it, argues Taussig (1984: 495), better explains the cycle of violence and culture of terror pursued by colonizers and their ability to rationalize it as a civilizing mission.

Taussig’s account prompts obvious parallels with contemporary forms of border violence and containment, whether rationalized as security measures or as humanitarian and developmental efforts to save life at sea and tackle ‘root causes’ of migration in origin states. When the ‘crisis’ and ‘tragedy’ of ‘irregular migration’ is reduced to an encounter at the borders of the global north and south and captured in images of gendered and racialized black and brown bodies – desperate and out-of-control men, suffering women and children – what affects and sentiments arise? Surely fear, but also compassion and guilt. Here too, arguably, is a colonial mirror that projects onto the migrant the same kind of exploitative, retaliatory and assimilationist ambitions that characterize contemporary neo-colonial relations, instilling a deep anxiety about what would happen if the tables were turned. Such anxieties may explain the vehement defence of border controls on account of the fear, for example that Muslim migrants, given the chance, would impose Sharia law on their hosts. Such anxieties may also explain the equally vehement insistence that border controls ought to be humane, while stopping short of questioning their necessity or justice in the first place. Arguably, in both cases, a structure of feeling incorporating profound degrees of discomfort and denial makes it possible to act in ways that would seem to contradict the worldview one espouses: in particular, the widespread espousal of liberal values alongside the widespread acceptance of illiberal border controls. Making a more direct connection between historical and contemporary forms of colonization and encampment, Ann Stoler (2016: 220) argues that reason alone has never been sufficient for imperial governance. Colonies and camps, she argues, rely on affective regimes whereby anxiety, fear and paranoia, but also compassion, sympathy and pity, do productive work, making certain kinds of enclosures, punishments, treatments and care thinkable and possible, even and especially when they seem to be unreasonable. If affect can be understood as more than emotion, as ‘involving feeling in thinking, and vice versa’ (Massumi, 2015: 91), then certain combinations of affect make it make sense for certain kinds of people to wait at the border, in camps, in countries of origin and resettlement, with only the promise of citizenship at best, in ways that would not be conceivable for others.

For analytical purposes I have overdrawn distinctions between each of these ways of accounting for the tenacity of international space and progressive time with respect to human mobility. In reality, certain modes of reason, structures of feeling and capitalist relations intersect to be productive as a whole, while not being centrally orchestrated or internally consistent. Together, they reinforce a particular arrangement of mobility, subjectivity, space and time in ways that obscure alternatives historically, in the present, and in the future. This arrangement, however, is neither stable nor totalizing. It is full of contradictions, gaps and counter-impulses. It cultivates subjects who police themselves, but who also resist their subjectification and whose subjectivity exceeds full capture. This arrangement relies on infrastructure that fails, and on governing agents with discretion. It produces effects in systematic and haphazard ways, the results of which can be multidirectional and unpredictable. The critical task is to relativize the assumptions that hold this arrangement in place and to stay attuned to grammars and practices that exceed capture by it. This is not because such grammars and practices will be suggestive of something better or more just, necessarily, but because their mere existence tells us that options are not exhausted by the narrow terms of political possibility registered within international space and progressive time. The challenge is to raise the profile of such grammars and practices in ways that are compelling, while resisting the conceptual habits that have such resonant force precisely because they do not necessitate a leap of imagination.

Reconstructive routes

I am not the first to argue for a reconstructive complement to the deconstructive critiques of mobility control or to suggest that the task begins with conceptual innovation. A decade ago, sociologist Adrian Favell (2008) suggested that migration theory ought to be ‘rebooted’. He asked his readers to imagine a scenario in which records of established literature had disappeared, conceptual frameworks had collapsed and objects of analysis had to be established afresh. Under those circumstances, Favell asked, would the standard spatial and temporal parameters placed around migration continue to be compelling, given their grounding in territorial understandings of border crossings, in distinct identities as citizens and migrants, and in assumptions about the length of time that makes certain kinds of movements migration and other kinds of movements something else. Favell challenged scholars to re-think the very concept of migration itself, on account of its embeddedness within the modern state system and the particular way in which it serves to carve up, classify and organize the movement of people.

In a similar vein, Martina Tazzioli (2015) has argued more recently that ‘[t]he hard task of transformative critique starts from the effort to not conflate practices of movement into the governmental signifier of “migration”’ (xvi). Tazzioli’s strategy is to pay attention to how one is produced as a migrant. Not all people on the move are made into migrants in this sense. High-skilled professionals working abroad, for example, are more likely to be thought of as ‘expats’ than migrants (Faist, 2014: 1642–1643). The distinction is not just semantic. It hangs on a crude division of people on the move into skilled and unskilled, cognitive and creative versus manual and generic, which increasingly provides the basis for immigration policies that reflect measures of productivity rather than overt measures of race. From a regulatory perspective, expats represent drivers of development, desirable residents and potential citizens while migrants represent problems of security and integration. The transnationality of expats registers as a productive resource while the transnationality of migrants is taken as an object of suspicion (Faist, 2013). Accordingly, expats are enticed with the kinds of entitlements, including the ability to have family members accompany them, that make their journeys future-oriented. Conversely, migrants enter under conditions that limit their rights and curtail wider social and sexual relations in ways that maintain a perpetual present and enhance removability (Iskander, 2017; Nah, 2012). Some migrants are brought into being as problems before they have moved at all. Risk profiles designate visa applicants from certain countries as flight risks, well before they have the chance to cross a border (Scheel, 2019).

With these distinctions in mind, Tazzioli (2015: 11), amongst others, advocates a strategy of ‘seeing like a migrant’ (see also Kalir, 2013: 312; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 17, 166). Starting from the perspective of someone whose mobility is subject to greater degrees of control sheds light on the ways in which migrants are constituted anew and differentially in ways that affirm the assumptions of international space and progressive time. Crucially, it also illuminates the ways in which people called migrants constitute themselves in other terms, express aspirations other than those they are assumed to have and live with others in ways that are suggestive of alternative political relations. This strategy, however, risks granting an epistemic privilege to the struggles of people called migrants and, in the process, buying into the assumptions that produce those people as migrants in the first place. If we are looking for what lies in excess of international space and progressive time, it seems reasonable to suggest that this will also emanate from those who are not called migrants and whose subject forms are less recognizable and articulatable from established starting points – a point I return to later.

The turn to mobility as an alternative analytic represents another attempt to de-centre migration and the migrant. In this case, a wide array of mobilities, including but not limited to people on the move, are considered in relation to each other and to immobilities and moorings (Cresswell, 2006; Cresswell and Merriman, 2011a; Hui, 2016; Sheller, 2014; Sheller and Urry, 2006). The turn is, in part, a reaction to the epistemic privilege accorded to stasis and sedentarism, whereby rootedness has been taken as foundational to membership. A mobilities approach calls into question the transience of the migrant as an anomalous condition in need of correction. In much of the relevant literature, the term mobility serves as a shorthand signal that all is not given with respect to the hierarchies, geographies and time frames routinely deployed to make sense of the movement of people. I have deployed the concept throughout this article in just this way.

The turn to mobility is generative because it opens up a focus on ‘routes, not roots’ (Clifford, cited in Cresswell, 2006: 82). Mobilities approaches ‘start with the fact of moving’ (Cresswell and Merriman, 2011b: 4) and ask ‘what happens on the move’; transit and motion and, conversely, stillness and waiting become objects of inquiry in themselves, rather than the dead time and space between points of departure and arrival (Adey et al., 2014: 3). In this respect, a mobilities approach resists the forward march of progressive time as the measure of history and draws attention to side-routes, delays and diversions as generative in themselves. Mobilities approaches contemplate mass and large scale movements alongside the micro and molecular, drawing attention to materially and conceptually imperceptible movements and ‘felt transitions’ (Massumi, 2015: 54) that generate momentum in individual and collective bodies towards that which could not have been imagined before (Merriman, 2019). Strongly aligned with a revival of processual thinking in contemporary social theory, there is much within the mobilities turn that unsettles congealed assumptions in relation to the movement of people. ¹

As an analytical strategy, the turn to mobility also presents certain risks and limitations. The most obvious risk is a positive bias towards mobility that reverses the hierarchy between fixity and motion. Cresswell (2006: 82–100) cautions against just this when he notes that the tendency to endow mobility with transgressive potential reflects the exoticization of nomadism in orientalist literature (see also Glick Shiller and Salazar, 2013). To the extent that the concept of mobility is positively weighted, it also provides conceptual resources to deepen as much as to challenge the hierarchies that currently structure the movement of people. Mobility aligns, in particular, with demands for flexibility, adaptation and self-innovation that characterize transnational labour markets in ways that decontextualize the movement of labour from the reasons why certain workers are compelled to be on the move and are denied forms of membership associated with settlement. Mobility-as-freedom can serve to rationalize neoliberal arguments – not so much for open borders – but for borders as gateways that open and close for different types of flows under conditions that maximize market responsiveness and minimize attachments and entitlements. It is no accident, in this respect, that the language of gateways and seamless flows now permeates agencies concerned with both border control and international logistics (ABF, 2018; Cowen, 2014). It is notable, in addition, that the recently released final draft of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, designed to harmonize intergovernmental Migration Management, makes multiple references to mobility, but only in relation to abstract labour, academic knowledge and skills that travel across borders and only to the extent that these mobilities are ‘market responsive’ (United Nations, 2018: 12). Where people are invoked in the document, the language of migration prevails. This is an example of what Thomas Faist (2014: 111) calls the ‘(mutual) conditionings and conjunctures’ of conceptual innovation in the academy and the broader policy environment. It is also at least partly why William Walters (2015: 472–473) argues that mobility has become too privileged a concept to retain a critical distance from the present and why Thomas Sutherland (2014) questions the radical potential of the mobilities turn ‘in an epoch when change, mobility, and flexibility would seem to be closer to hegemonic constructs than ideals of resistance’ (935). It is worth noting, finally, that states and empires have historically championed mobility as a universal freedom, while presiding over arrangements that imposed mobility with varying degrees of violence (Cocks, 2014; Mongia, 2018; Quirk and Vigneswaran, 2015). That mobility has long been deployed as a form of statecraft via dispossession, slavery, population transfer and the movement of indentured workers serves as a reminder of the blinkers and blind-spots frequently attending mobility-as-freedom narratives.

The problem of positive bias attached to mobility may be compounded when the term is deployed as if it were somehow neutral and plainly descriptive. Trying to address this problem, Cresswell (2006: 16) distinguishes between movement as ‘the general fact of displacement’ from one point to another and mobility as ‘socially produced motion’ that is ascribed meaning in positive or negative terms, experienced differentially, and subject to politics. Cresswell’s insistence on the politics at stake in invoking mobility is laudable. However, his delineation between movement and mobility in terms of political content may itself be problematic. Two brief examples serve to illustrate why it may not be so simple to isolate a pure sense of movement (or stillness) in space from the politics of (im)mobility.

Ghassan Hage (2005) argues that physical and existential mobility are intimately linked, such that movement in space (in Cresswell’s sense) can also be experienced as movement in time – a politically inflected movement more akin to Cresswell’s sense of mobility. For Hage, these parallel motions are socially experienced such that the movement of a family member in space may produce a movement in time for those who remain (physically) still. This sense of upward mobility may be further reinforced by the physical movement of remittances from one location to another, enabling material improvements in the place where one remains. The temporal dimension of existential mobility (allowing for movement while staying still) exceeds the spatial specificity of Cresswell’s ‘fact of displacement’ and troubles the extent to which any ‘fact of displacement’ can be isolated to individual bodies.

One further example is instructive. In his inquiry into different modes of historical practice, anthropologist Minoru Hokari (2011: 100–102) struggles to understand and translate the mobilities he witnesses amongst the Gurindji people of the Victoria River region in Northern Australia from a perspective that distinguishes between movement and stasis. The mobilities Hokari witnesses involve leaving one’s regular dwelling and embarking on sometimes long journeys in distance and duration. But these journeys do not entail leaving home, or leaving one’s moorings. For the Gurindji people, Hokari suggests, mobility is a way of staying home, being-at-home and maintaining one’s home. Mobility does not have the sense of venturing into unknown territory, although one may not have been to the places one is moving through. Mobility is a way of affirming what is known; it is not exploration, change, progression or freedom as much as consolidation and timelessness. I cannot pretend to understand this sense of mobility and certainly not to translate it here. But this brief account is intended to convey that what it means to be on the move is not obvious, homogeneous or free from political effects. When movement is invoked in neutral terms, as prior to the overlay of social and political meaning, the concept may already be doing productive work to occlude modes of being, living and relating in which it is inconceivable to abstract moving and staying from each other in the first place. It may well be that metaphors such as vibration (Bissell, 2010), or friction (Tsing, 2005), or rhythm (Lefebvre, 2004) are better able to signal a layering of stillness and motion, emplacement and displacement, position and transition, in ways that are less beholden to established binaries and more evocative of other relations whose articulation remains necessarily provisional.

For these reasons then, I am wary of calls to ‘situate human mobility at the center of our epistemological frameworks’ and to acknowledge mobility as ‘an ontological facet of the human condition’ (De Genova, 2018: 5, 6). I have no quibble with the significance of all that is signalled by the trope of mobility for key political questions of our time. However, I hesitate to hitch the human condition to a concept that is so deeply implicated in the present historical moment. Doing so would seem to fix humanity around another universal that, if Hage and Hokari’s insights are to be taken seriously, may well have very particular instantiations. Fixing mobility in this way works against the processual thinking otherwise central to much of the mobilities literature that has been so successful in carving out conceptual space to think in more open-ended terms. For all that the concept of mobility illuminates about the problematic recourse to migration as a given starting point for analysis, it risks becoming ossified around fixed meanings that obscure as much as they reveal. If the givenness of migration ought to be questioned, then the challenge also extends to the givenness of mobility. The challenge extends, in turn, to the givenness of a right to mobility as the best way of conceiving what is fundamental to the subjects around which we may wish to build alternative conceptions of membership.

Taking up this challenge may not imply abandoning mobility as an analytic but it does imply being conscious of its limitations. It also acts as a prompt to imagine beyond mobility. What might come from resisting the distinction between movement and stasis? Could this enliven the potential for a world in which the regulatory impulse to close or open borders or to defend or deny mobility no longer makes intuitive sense? What would that world look like? What modes of relationality would it entail? What spatial and temporal dimensions might it take? What elements of this world already exist?

Social movements and alternative worlds

Theoretically, then, the task to think outside of international space and progressive time is less about inventing concepts to capture something new, than resisting the impulse to contain or explain the existing, unfamiliar and speculative, via the concepts to which we are habituated. Can we work with a deliberately tentative and incomplete grasp on the phenomena that condition mobility in order to imagine a future in ways that are neither continuations of the present ‘political reality’ nor merely its antithesis? Empirically, the task entails investigating examples that provide glimpses into other worlds: other ways of being, living, identifying, relating, organizing and struggling that do not take international space, movement across it and integration within it, as the organizing frame; and other ways of experiencing mobility and immobility that are not premised upon singular, unidirectional, predictable movements in time.

Historically, the task is in part, as William Walters (2015: 473) suggests, to historicize mobility, ‘tracing its lines of emergence and crystallization’ in order to politicize its deployment in the present. More generatively, the task is to ask of history: what else was there that doesn’t make sense when read through a mobilities lens? Who else was there, whose subject form is hard to make sense of via attempts to ‘see like a migrant’? What were they doing? Where, and with what sense of spatial form? For what and with whom did they struggle? What kinds of affects and modes of reason made their struggles possible and their horizons seem necessary? This approach differs considerably from recent studies that project the present ubiquity of mobility back onto the past, showing how borders – international or otherwise – have always been used to segregate, essentialize, re-route and contain (Nail, 2015, 2016). This latter approach situates contemporary border violence in a longer standing set of political manoeuvres and sheds light on historical continuities. However, the effect is also to filter out other kinds of social and political relations that are less recognizable from the perspective of the present. By insisting on a single thread of border logic between the past and the present, this kind of history does little to suggest that the future might somehow be different.

More revealing are studies of lesser-known political struggles that have either been written out of the historical record, or registered only as irrelevances, quirks and failures, precisely because they provide no evidence of a progressive evolution towards international space (Abraham, 2015; Shilliam, 2016). Other scholars re-examine better-known struggles that are hinged to progressive narratives – the Paris Commune for example – in order to reveal the details that have been dropped from or overlooked within prevailing accounts because they were suggestive of other kinds of aspirations, affects, relations and reason (Ross, 2015). These studies focus in on history’s occlusions in order to harness ‘the productive qualities of the failed and imagined’ (Stoler, 2016: 96).

One promising line of inquiry, in this respect, lies in recent efforts to revisit the failed internationalist visions of the 20th century, that emerged from the struggles of those who were denied citizenship in full and equal terms, or those who refused to limit their visions of post-colonial self-rule to the standard models of sovereignty and nation-state citizenship. To this end, Indigenous internationalisms (Simpson, 2017), anti-imperialist and working men’s internationalisms (Gandhi, 2006), black and anti-racist internationalisms (Vitalis, 2015) and anti-capitalist and anti-colonial internationalisms (Cooper, 2014; Prashad, 2009) have all been subject to recent critical attention. In the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, radical black thought in the United States linked an ‘internal-colony’ thesis to anti-colonial solidarities with independence movements across the Black diaspora, and promoted the United Nations, in advance of its alignment with Cold War geopolitics, as an institution that could further an anti-colonial agenda and democratic internationalism (Von Eschen, 1997). French African and Antillean intellectuals of the mid-20th century also developed a transcontinental vision of political association. They imagined forms of confederalism that reworked imperial formations to take account of the interdependence of colony and metropole ‘without the need for state sovereignty’ (Wilder, 2015: 1). These internationalisms tend to be ‘hidden geographies’ that are, via both historical revision and active repression, ‘frequently … silenced and obscured’ (Featherstone, 2012: 8–9). Unearthed and re-enlivened, however, they destabilize the givenness of international space in its prevailing form and act as critical resources for the making of alternative worlds.

Alternative internationalisms directly inform contemporary social movements, including for example, the Movement for Black Lives, which advocates specific forms of international solidarity in order to resist the conditions of possibility for anti-black racism. ² A wide range of recent and contemporary social movements might be probed for grammars and practices that take neither international space in its prevailing form, nor its attendant subjectivities as organizing frames, and for how those movements connect with histories that do not map onto the progressive evolution of a society of states. If we were only to ‘see like a migrant’ or to focus on mobility – in the sense of moving as distinct from staying – we might well miss the ways in which diverse and potentially widespread experiences amongst citizens, aliens, imperial subjects and incipient cosmopolitans are suggestive of other forms of life.

There is nothing automatic about alliances between different groups that have been dispossessed, marginalized, contained and detained in ways that are rationalized through the assumptions of international space and progressive time. While Indigenous peoples, (formerly) enslaved peoples, and people called migrants have been subject to related technologies of encampment and colonization (Stoler, 2016), it is not the case that they have always understood their struggles in similar terms, escaped implication in each other’s oppression, encountered each other as natural or even possible allies, or come to common internal positions on any of these matters (Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Lucero, 2014; Madsen, 2014; Miles, 2015). Rather than attempting to align such struggles through logic or necessity, their intersections and limitations remain an empirical question. What prompts particular encounters between groups and individuals, whose respective positions on different sides of the borders of international space appear to occupy the sharp end of hierarchies of the human? What kinds of friction ensue? Which aspects of these encounters cannot be absorbed into the standard narratives of binary oppositions and citizenship’s progressive evolution? What social and political practices actively refuse or defy legibility within the space–time coordinates of borders, migration and citizenship-as-usual? What elements of these encounters might work as critical resources for an expansion of the possible with respect to the space and time of political association?

As entry points for these questions, and as sites for further empirical inquiry, I have in mind cases where Aboriginal people have granted passports to migrants and refugees who are detained or slated for deportation (Cox, 2014; Pugliese, 2015). As sovereign disputes, such cases might be dismissed as reproducing the logic of international space, inverting claims to sovereign control rather than disrupting systems of rule that rest upon it (Mamdani, 2001; Sharma and Wright, 2008–2009). Some kinds of Indigenous claims to sovereignty may well take this form. However, others rest on a relation to land and country that is not reducible to the ‘possessive logics’ of international space (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: xii). The latter may be true even while the language deployed to assert such claims (land, territory, sovereignty) is designed to be legible and authoritative within prevailing epistemes. In such cases, there is a risk of conflating the strategic deployment of received ideas about sovereign space with acquiescence to those ideas as the fullest expression of the political claim at stake. Keeping in mind these open questions of strategy and legibility, how might the extension of passports by Aboriginal people signal something more than a reproduction of prevailing sovereign norms? And might that excess offer critical resources for engaging more creatively with border politics and human mobility?

I have in mind an expanded sanctuary movement in the United States, that is creating spaces of refuge from the carceral networks through which black and brown citizens and migrants are criminalized and detained (Paik, 2017). The notion of expanded sanctuary connects to the Movement for Black Lives that aspires to modes of ‘transformational solidarity’ between black, migrant and queer groups too often pitted against each other in ways that obscure shared forms of oppression and the potential for common political platforms (Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), 2018; Hesse and Hooker, 2017). What forms of refusal, affect and relationality that criss-cross the usual boundaries are making this movement possible? What forms of refuge and community become material and imaginable through such mobilizations and are they legible within the scope of international space and progressive time?

I have in mind the organizing strategies of deportees – no longer migrants as such – estranged in their countries of origin, whose citizenship offers little forward movement in time but every reason to identify with others displaced in the same territorial space (Anderson and Solis, 2014; Délano Alonso, 2018; Khosravi, 2016). My wager is that these social movements may be opening new spaces, organically, in which it stops making sense to distinguish the interests of citizens from migrants or to use those figures to articulate the terms in which protagonists either understand their past and present or imagine their collective futures. If that is the case – and it remains an empirical question – then my proposition is not that these examples offer ready-made alternative worlds. It is rather that they offer a basis from which to claim that other worlds are not a utopian horizon, but part of lived reality – albeit in partial, fragmentary and incipient forms. Such examples make it possible to see certain kinds of micro-struggles in relation to each other and in relation to macro-scale change. Bringing alternative worlds to bear on the enduring power of sovereign states to control human mobility remains a daunting challenge, but one that need not be imagined in terms of a wholesale shift from one mode of self-understanding and political relation to another. My proposition is not, therefore, that the existence of other worlds in the here and now compels us to abandon, for example, legal and policy interventions that negotiate and moderate the worst excesses of sovereign border violence. It is rather that awareness of other worlds might orient strategic collaborations that shape collective struggle in ways that are at once more imaginative, historically informed, and attuned to the actually existing.